Bestie

BESTIE is a light-hearted exploration of adult female friendship, the roles we play as women, and how we confront aspects of ourselves we find in others.

**Making this film:**

This short film was made by a diverse group of women during a blistering winter weekend. The apartment was so hot we thought we’d melt.

Bringing together an ethnically-, age-, and queer-diverse, all-female crew of emerging filmmakers had been a personal vision for me for a long time as an artist, a feminist, and citizen of the world.

Curating this environment of female leadership supported by 'female craftsmanship', felt not only natural but imperative for BESTIE. That imperative made it harder to find the right people to come on board my teeny, self-financed, more-or-less-let’s-face-it vanity short. Even after years of active membership in New York Women in Film & Television and other women-in-film organizations around the world, I didn’t have a community of female filmmakers at my fingertips to just call up to crew up. It seemed like for every position, everything we needed to get started, everything that went wrong in post, I or someone else “knew a guy” who would be just right for this or that. The fact that is was so hard to crew up in this way showed why it was so important to do so. Keeping to the vision took longer. It was worth the wait.

**What happens in the film:**

BESTIE follows one woman’s search for her true best friend.

**Where BESTIE came from:**

We live in a time and part of the world where online dating and professional networking is an assumed part of our daily life, and urban women are expected to develop a thick skin and extreme vetting process for finding the right mate and career. Where are these efficient, personalized systems in place to help us find platonic female friendship? Are these tight bonds of friendships, typically formed in adolescence and early adulthood, still available to us later in life?

In a culture of control, commodification, and self-selection, can we weed out the dross on our way to that diamond in the rough?

**What BESTIE is NOT about:** men, women wanting men, women bonding over men, women fighting over men. It is not gritty, bone-deep, or overtly political.

**What BESTIE IS about:** women, friendship, loneliness, searching for connection, searching for validation, dealing with judgement from those we presumed to be allies, dealing with our own judgement of others, the disappointment we feel when someone is not who we hoped they would be.

BESTIE is light, fun, funny. There’s a character in BESTIE that reminds you of the worst parts of someone you love, and the best parts of someone you mostly can’t stand. Maybe she even reminds you of you.

--@AmandaPrasow
Writer, Producer, Performer